Technological advances have provided various sectors of society like government, industry, commerce and entertainment with access to networked information in order to increase operational and commercial efficiencies. In particular, manufacturers of consumer electronic devices (e.g. digital cameras, media players, digital picture frames, etc.) and/or home appliances (e.g. refrigerators, microwave ovens, air conditioning units, etc.) are moving towards creating smarter devices and/or appliances that can communicate over various networks. Such conventional systems can employ WiFi (Wireless Fidelity), Bluetooth® and/or existing wide area wireless technologies to communicate with devices and/or appliances. However, these conventional technologies are expensive to manage and/or implement and have not achieved commercial success.
With an expected increase in the size of the 4G (fourth generation) ecosystem, LTE (Long Term Evolution) radio communication systems can be incorporated in most any consumer devices and/or appliances. Moreover, as the volume of the 4G ecosystem grows, the price points for LTE radio communication systems can be significantly reduced and thus they can be easily incorporated in consumer devices and/or home appliances at a relatively small incremental cost. Specifically, these devices and/or appliances can access a core network and can have individual credentials for authentication with the core network. In this scenario, each manufacturer or vendor can possibly become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) and hence dilute ownership of the customer by an existing service provider/operator.
The conventional approaches proposed for LTE based consumer electronic devices and/or home appliances provide multiple identities (each per device) for a single user and thus multiple billing relationships. Thus, for example, in a home-networking scenario, a single homeowner can have a separate identity and bill for each LTE based device in the house. In another example of a factory, each machine in the factory can access the core network independently and have a unique identity and bill. From an end user perspective, this can be extremely frustrating as the number of LTE based devices for the user increases.